Planet-forming disc around V883 Orionis. This star is currently in outburst. The dark ring midway through the disc is the point where the temperature and pressure dip low enough for water ice to form. Orbits of the planet Neptune and dwarf planet Pluto in our Solar System are shown for scale.
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Cieza
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This artist’s impression shows the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. In the outermost part of the disc volatile gases are frozen out as ice, which contains complex organic molecules. An outburst of energy from the star heats the inner disc to a temperature that evaporates the ice and releases the complex molecules, enabling astronomers to detect it. The inset image shows the chemical structure of complex organic molecules detected and presumed in the protoplanetary disc (from left to right): propionitrile (ethyl cyanide), glycolonitrile, alanine, glycine, ethylene glycol, acetonitrile (methyl cyanide).
If you listen to creationists, you might be persuaded to believe that the formation of inorganic chemicals—often deliberately conflated with 'life' to evoke an emotional reaction—is, for all practical purposes, impossible without the intervention of a supernatural intelligence. This is, of course, nothing more than the familiar creationist fallback: the god of the gaps argument, coupled with a false dichotomy, and dressed up with a spurious veneer of mathematical ‘proof’.
But this tactic suffered yet another fatal blow recently with the publication of a study led by Abubakar Fadul of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), which reported the discovery of organic molecules in the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star V883 Orionis. This finding provides compelling evidence that the formation of prebiotic molecules can begin even before planets form—suggesting that Earth may have developed with a complement of organic compounds already present in the accretion disc from which it emerged.
An alternative, but equally plausible, hypothesis is that these molecules could have been delivered by meteorites or other interplanetary bodies.
Information about endogenous retroviruses is normally unwelcome news for creationists because they form phylogenies which exactly map onto the evolution of different species from common ancestry. This is no less true of a new research paper published by four researchers from the College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, published in Molecular Biology & Evolution.
Endogenous retroviruses for part of the 'junk' (non-coding/non-regulatory) DNA, but some of it have been exapted for other functions over the years and some of it has placed an evolving taxon onto a new evolutionary trajectory. For example, one exapted retrovirus with immuno-suppressive qualities has made placental mammals possible without the growing embryo being treated as a parasite and attacked by the mother's immune system.
The researchers have uncovered the complex evolutionary history of retroviruses in birds by analysing their genetic “fossils” — endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) — embedded in bird genomes. They scanned the genomes of 758 bird species and identified more than 470,000 ERV sequences, revealing a vast and previously underestimated diversity of retroviruses. These sequences are the remnants of ancient viral infections that became part of the host DNA, passed down from generation to generation.
A recent discovery by palaeoanthropologists, led by researchers from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, highlights the stark difference between how a teleological thinker—such as a creationist—imagines evolution works and how it actually proceeds. The study found that the teeth of ancient hominins evolved over a period of some 700,000 years in response to the increasing availability of soft, starchy foods, which began to replace the coarse, fibrous plant matter they had previously consumed.
A teleological thinker—someone who sees purpose and agency in natural processes—would assume that something *caused* the teeth to evolve in order to better process the new food. However, as the theory of evolution predicts, any variation that improves efficiency in food processing or reduces the now-unnecessary cost of growing and maintaining large teeth will be favoured by natural selection. Over evolutionary time, such traits become more common. In the case of archaic hominins, this meant their teeth gradually became smaller.
Teleological thinkers often make the mistake of believing that asking, "Who or what told the teeth they needed to change?" or "How did the teeth know they had to evolve?" is a meaningful challenge to evolutionary theory. To them, it seems reasonable to assume a supernatural intelligence must be involved.
This simplistic view of evolution is actively encouraged by creationist pseudo-scientists such as William A. Dembski and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, who claim that the genetic information resulting from such optimisation must have been intelligently designed because it is "specified" for a purpose. Of course, at every stage of human evolution, the genetic information that produced a particular tooth shape was necessarily "specified" for that outcome. Dembski never discloses this to his audience, nor does he attempt to correct the teleological bias on which his movement depends.
An interesting aspect of this discovery is that the evolutionary change in this case was driven not so much by environmental change - the starch foods had always been there - as by a change in behaviour - a case of meme-gene co-evolution, using the term 'meme' in the original sense as coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, to mean a unit of cultural inheritance - the analogue of the gene in genetic inheritance.
his story could almost have been tailor-made to embarrass creationists – though, in truth, most scientific papers do that. It concerns the evolution of potatoes by a process that creationists insist never happens: speciation. Adding to their discomfort, this event took place around 9 million years before ‘Creation Week’, during that vast expanse of ‘pre-Creation’ history in which 99.9975% of Earth’s history – and life’s – unfolded.
Speciation is usually a slow, gradual process, occurring over thousands or millions of years as populations diverge under environmental pressures. But in some cases – particularly in plants – a new species can arise almost instantaneously through hybridisation, when a fertile offspring results from the cross between two different species, genetically isolated from both parents.
This latter form of speciation has now been shown to account for the evolution of the potato. Some 9 million years ago, a natural hybridisation event between a tomato-like plant and a species of Etuberosum gave rise to a new lineage. Today, there are around 107 recognised potato species in South America. While closely related to both tomatoes and Etuberosum (a genus with three species that look remarkably like potatoes), neither of those relatives produce tubers. The hybrid did – and that made all the difference.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have demonstrated that this ancient hybridisation created the genetic mechanism for tuber formation. This allowed the new species to survive harsher environments by overwintering underground as stem tubers. From this key innovation sprang a radiation of new potato species, each adapting to a range of ecological niches.
And, as an added discomfort for creationists, the scientists show no signs of thinking that the known mechanisms of biological evolution were inadequate to explain how this speciation event occurred and required a special magical act of divine intervention to make it happen by creating new information in the genome.
The genetic control of tuber formation in potatoes.
The genetic control of tuber formation in potatoes has been the subject of extensive research, particularly because of its agricultural importance and evolutionary significance. The newly published study in Cell (2025) offers a major advance, pinpointing the evolutionary origin and genetic mechanism behind this trait. Here's a summary of what’s currently known, drawing from both the recent paper and prior research:
(b) Scrumping of Pentadesma butyracea (Clusiaceae) by a western gorilla.
Photograph: MMR.
(c) Scrumping of Gambeya albida (syn. Chrysophyllum albidum; Sapotaceae) by an eastern chimpanzee.
Photograph: CH.
The human ability to consume and metabolise alcohol efficiently may trace back to our ape ancestors, who regularly ate overripe and fermented fruit with a naturally high alcohol content. This is according to researchers from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and Dartmouth College, USA.
The bad news for creationists is that this discovery strongly supports the common ancestry of modern apes and humans. The researchers are in no doubt that the Theory of Evolution explains the presence of the same genetic mutation in African apes — including humans — which allows us to metabolise alcohol around 40 times more efficiently than orangutans, which lack the mutation.
This mutation enables African apes to consume fermented fruit — often as a social activity — in a pattern of alcohol consumption strikingly similar to that seen in humans.
To describe this behaviour in wild chimpanzees, the researchers have borrowed the term scrumping — a familiar UK English word for the (often illicit) picking and eating of apples, particularly by children. The word derives from the Middle Low German schrimpen, meaning ‘shrivelled or shrunken’ (to describe over-ripe fruit). It also survives in the name of the traditional West Country cider known as scrumpy.
A study recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports the discovery of a mixture of archaic and modern traits in the dentition of 300,000-year-old hominin fossils unearthed at the Hualongdong site in Anhui Province, China.
These fossils predate the migration of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) out of Africa by around 250,000 years. They indicate that hominin populations in East Asia were already diversifying and possibly interbreeding with archaic humans, such as Homo erectus, to form lineages distinct from both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The research, led by Professor Wu Xiujie, director of the Hualongdong excavations, is the result of a longstanding collaboration between scientists from the Dental Anthropology Group at CENIEH — María Martinón-Torres, Director of CENIEH and corresponding author of the paper, and José María Bermúdez de Castro, researcher ad honorem at CENIEH — and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing.
The findings reveal a rich and complex picture of human evolution in East Asia, wholly at odds with the simplistic biblical narrative still clung to by creationists. That account, written by ancient people with no knowledge of the broader world, reflects a worldview in which Earth was small, flat, covered by a dome, and located at the centre of the universe.
A group of Issa Valley chimpanzees navigate an open woodland crown to forage on new leaves.
Image by Rhianna C. Drummond-Clarke/Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC)
A new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution delivers yet more evidence for the Theory of Evolution and decisively contradicts Bible-literalist creationism. By closely studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Issa Valley—an environment that mirrors the mixed woodland–savannah habitats of our early ancestors—researchers found that these apes still spend most of their time in trees and conduct over 85 % of their bipedal movements arboreally. This finding strongly supports the evolutionary view that human bipedalism did not emerge from a sudden exodus from trees but evolved gradually while our ancestors still relied heavily on arboreal habitats.
What is particularly striking is the complete absence of any doubt among the scientists that evolution, driven by natural selection, is the correct framework for interpreting these observations. At no point do they resort to supernatural explanations or even hint that evolution might be insufficient to explain the data. On the contrary, their conclusions seamlessly integrate with the existing evolutionary narrative, demonstrating how behaviours seen in modern chimpanzees provide a living window into the adaptations of our shared ancestors. This directly undermines the creationist claim that mainstream biologists are “abandoning” evolution in favour of unproven religious explanations—a claim that has no basis in reality.
Creationist dogma insists on static, unchanging “kinds” and appeals to unverifiable supernatural causes. Yet, studies like this show that every aspect of our evolutionary past—anatomical, genetic, and behavioural—can be explained through natural processes, without the need for divine intervention. The evidence for a shared ancestry between humans and other primates grows with every new study, while creationism remains stuck with no predictive power and no scientific methodology.
In short, this research reinforces the power and universality of the Theory of Evolution. The scientists involved didn’t set out to “disprove creationism”; they simply applied rigorous observation and analysis, and the results—once again—fell squarely on the side of evolution. Far from being abandoned, the ToE continues to thrive as the backbone of modern biology, while creationism, with its untestable supernatural entities, offers no explanation at all.
Excavation at the Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany.
Photo: Professor Wil Roebroeks, Leiden University
125,000-year-old Neanderthal ‘fat factory’ discovered in Germany - Leiden University
More evidence has emerged that Neanderthals were far from the slow-witted, lumbering brutes of popular myth. In fact, they were highly organised, culturally sophisticated, and capable of processing food on what can only be described as an industrial scale.
This latest insight comes from a team of archaeologists led by researchers from MONREPOS (Leibniz Centre for Archaeology, Germany) and Leiden University (The Netherlands), in collaboration with the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (Germany). Their findings were recently published in Science Advances.
At a site known as Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany, dating back 125,000 years, the researchers have discovered compelling evidence of a bone-processing ‘factory’. Here, Neanderthals systematically broke up the massive bones of straight-tusked elephants and other large mammals—including deer, horses, and aurochs—to extract fat from the marrow by steeping the fragments in hot water. The straight-tusked elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tonnes, would have yielded enough meat to feed 2,000 adult humans their daily caloric needs.
This site predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe by tens of thousands of years, placing it firmly within the Neanderthal era. At the time, Europe was enjoying an interglacial period with a climate comparable to today's.
One of the authors of the study, Professor Aléssio Datovo, poses next to a coelacanth specimen on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (photo: personal archive)
Here is something that will cause creationists to jump for joy – until they read beyond the headline (if they ever do). Scientists have announced that they were wrong about the evolution of the vertebrate skull, including that of mammals.
However, beneath that headline lie some disappointing facts for creationists:
The error was uncovered by re-examining the 400-million-year-old skull of a coelacanth.
The mistake concerns details of how the vertebrate skull evolved – not whether it evolved.
The paper directly contradicts the common creationist claim that scientists are only permitted to publish research that conforms to the scientific consensus. This study openly challenges the prevailing view.
The discovery enhances our understanding of how the vertebrate skull evolved from that of ancestral lobe-finned fishes – precisely the kind of evidence creationists would rather didn’t exist.
Still, creationists can enjoy the headline and may even use it to 'prove' to their audience that science is unreliable because scientists sometimes make mistakes. Of course, they’ll likely ignore the fact that the fossil in question is 400 million years old, and gloss over the reality that – unlike religious dogma – science is a process of continuous refinement. Science allows for doubt, re-examination, and re-evaluation. When the evidence changes, scientists change their minds. In contrast, religious dogma is fixed and unchanging, usually despite the evidence, not because of it, hence the widening gap between what creationists are required to believe and what science reveals.
Upon re-examining the cranial musculature of the African coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), the researchers found that only 13% of the previously identified evolutionary muscle innovations in major vertebrate lineages were accurate. They also identified nine new evolutionary transformations related to innovations in feeding and respiration.
The researchers, Professor Aléssio Datovo from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil and the late David Johnson from the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, who sadly died when the paper was in review, have just published their findings in Science Advances.
A recent paper in Nature marks a landmark advance in historical linguistics and ancient human migration studies.
Properly understood, the paper devastates Bible literalist dogmas. In solving what had been something of a mystery for linguistics and anthropology, it utterly refutes basic Bible narratives such as a global genocidal flood and a resetting of the human population of Earth some 4,300 years ago, followed by a repopulation from a focal point in the Middle East.
By sequencing and analysing 180 previously unstudied ancient Siberian genomes and integrating them with over 1,300 global ancient DNA datasets spanning 11,000 years, the study robustly traces the prehistoric roots of the Uralic language family—including Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian—to Central Siberia nearly 4,500 years ago [1, 2]. In doing so, it offers scientific clarity on how languages—and by extension cultures—spread via human migrations over millennia. This extends far beyond simplistic literal interpretations of Bible genealogies, emphasising the deep time, continuous migrations and cultural dynamics that falsify any notion of sudden, static origination of peoples as posited in young‑earth creation narratives.
Likewise, the Harvard Gazette article contextualises these genetic findings for a broader audience, highlighting how interdisciplinary scholarship — particularly the work led by recent graduates under guidance from ancient DNA expert David Reich — identifies a distinct genetic signature (“Yakutia\_LNBA”) strongly associated with speakers of Uralic languages who migrated from Eastern Siberia westward over thousands of years [2]. The piece explicitly notes that language transmission is not genetically deterministic, and warns against over‑simplified correlations. By underscoring the necessity of large data, critical caution, and peer‑reviewed methodology, the article reinforces the fundamentally scientific (not scriptural) basis for understanding human prehistory.
From a Bible‑literalist creationist perspective—which often assumes humanity’s origins in specific, recent Middle Eastern events described in scripture—these studies are significant because they offer:
Robust empirical timelines: ancient DNA data covering up to 11,000 years, demonstrating population movements and admixture across Eurasia.
Clear geographic origins far from the traditional Biblical settings, with linguistic groups emerging from Central Siberian ancestries—not from post‑Flood dispersion from Babel.
Methodological transparency: ancient genomes, radiocarbon dating, linguistic phylogenies, and cultural archaeology collectively underpin conclusions, in stark contrast to dogmatic, text‑based literalism.
What is known of the Yamnaya, their migration and their impact on European society?
The Yamnaya (or Yamna) culture was a highly influential Bronze Age population that emerged on the Pontic–Caspian steppe (modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia) around 3300–2600 BCE. They are best known for their role in a major migratory event that reshaped the genetic, cultural, and linguistic landscape of Europe and parts of Asia.
Key Features of the Yamnaya Culture
Pastoralist Lifestyle: The Yamnaya were semi-nomadic herders, primarily of cattle, sheep, and horses.
Kurgan Burials: They are associated with the construction of kurgans — large burial mounds containing individual or family graves, often with grave goods, indicating social stratification.
Use of Wagons and Domesticated Horses: The Yamnaya are among the earliest groups to use wheeled transport and to domesticate horses for riding and traction, dramatically improving mobility across the steppe.
Patriarchal and Warrior-Oriented Society: Burial practices and grave goods suggest a male-dominated society with an emphasis on warfare and prestige.
Migration and Expansion
From around 3000 BCE, the Yamnaya expanded both westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia:
Westward Migration (into Europe)
The Yamnaya migrated into Central and Northern Europe, mixing with local Neolithic farming populations.
This movement is thought to correspond with the Corded Ware culture (~2900–2300 BCE), which displays strong Yamnaya ancestry and cultural influences.
Genetic studies indicate that Yamnaya-related ancestry accounts for a significant portion (up to 75%) of the ancestry in many modern northern and central Europeans.
Eastward Expansion (into Asia)
Yamnaya groups moved into the Altai region and Central Asia, laying foundations for cultures such as the Afanasievo culture.
This eastward movement has implications for the spread of Indo-European languages deep into Asia, including links to the Tocharian branch.
Impact on European Society
The Yamnaya migration was transformative:
Genetic Legacy
Ancient DNA studies (notably by David Reich and colleagues) have shown that Yamnaya-related ancestry replaced or substantially mixed with earlier Neolithic farming populations across Europe.
Their arrival is associated with a massive genetic turnover, particularly in northern Europe.
Linguistic Impact
The Yamnaya are widely considered prime candidates for the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed ancestral language of most modern European and many Asian languages.
Their migrations likely spread PIE or its early offshoots into Europe and Asia.
Technological and Cultural Influence
They introduced or accelerated the adoption of:
Horse riding and chariotry.
Wheeled vehicles and carts.
New burial customs and metallurgy.
These innovations had a cascading effect on social organisation, warfare, and mobility.
Social Structures
Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests the formation of patrilineal kin-based chiefdoms, with dominant Y-chromosome lineages spreading rapidly, reflecting elite male dominance in expanding societies.
Significance in Refuting Creationism
The Yamnaya's role in shaping European prehistory is incompatible with young-Earth or Biblical-literalist timelines:
Their migrations and cultural influence spanned thousands of years, beginning well before any supposed Biblical Flood (~2400 BCE) or the Tower of Babel.
The evidence for their existence and movements comes from radiocarbon dating, stratigraphy, and genomics — methods rejected or undermined by creationist models.
The Yamnaya language dispersal supports evolutionary linguistics, not the sudden emergence of multiple languages as described in Genesis 11.
In Summary
The Yamnaya were a Bronze Age steppe people whose vast migrations and cultural innovations played a pivotal role in shaping the genetics, languages, and social systems of much of Europe and Asia. Their legacy stands as a powerful testament to deep-time human history, migration, and cultural change—firmly grounded in empirical evidence and thoroughly incompatible with literalist interpretations of the Bible.
Together, the Nature paper and Harvard Gazette explanation represent not only a breakthrough in our scientific understanding of language family origins, but also a powerful rebuttal to any worldview that insists on a literal‑historical reading of Genesis to explain the diversity and dispersal of peoples.
Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language family’s originsParent emerged over 4,000 years ago in Siberia, farther east than many thought, then rapidly spread west
Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages — which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.
The analysis, led by a pair of recent graduates with oversight from ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published this month in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.
The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia.
Geographically, it’s closer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim, co-lead author.
Department of Genetics
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence.
Our paper helps show that the latter scenario is more likely. We can see this genetic pulse coming from the east just as Uralic languages were expanding.
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng, co-lead author
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
The discovery was made possible by Kim’s long-term effort to gather ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-sampled regions. As he helped establish, many modern-day Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia. People from all other ethnolinguistic groups were found, by and large, to lack this distinct ancestry.
Genetic ties to Yakutia also show up in sets of hyper-mobile forager hunter-gatherers believed to have spread Uralic languages to northern Scandinavia’s indigenous Sámi people and as far south as Hungary, now a linguistic island surrounded by German, Slovak, and other Indo-European languages.
Proto-Uralic speakers overlapped in time with the Yamnaya, the culture of horseback herders credited with transmitting Indo-European across Eurasia’s grasslands. A pair of recent papers, led by Reich and others in his Harvard-based lab, zeroed in on the Yamnaya homeland, showing it was mostly likely within the current borders of Ukraine just over 5,000 years ago.
We can see these waves going back and forth — and interacting — as these two major language families expanded. Just as we see Yakutia ancestry moving east to west, our genetic data show Indo-Europeans spreading west to east.
Professor David Reich, co-corresponding author.
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
But Uralic’s influence was largely anchored in the north.
We’re talking about the taiga — the large expanse of boreal forest that goes from Scandinavia almost to the Bering Strait. This isn’t territory you can simply ride a horse through.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
Kim... concentrated in organismic and evolutionary biology at the College and studied archaeology at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Archaeologists have long connected Uralic’s spread with what is called the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, or the sudden appearance around 4,000 years ago of technologically advanced bronze-casting methods across northern Eurasia.
The resulting artifacts, primarily weapons and other displays of power, have also been tied to an era of global climate changes that could have advantaged the small-scale cultures that spoke Uralic languages during and after the Seima-Turbino phenomenon.
Bronze often had a transformative effect on the cultures that used it. Bronze really catalyzed long-distance trade. To start using it, societies really needed to develop new social connections and institutions. [the need to source raw materials — largely copper and tin — from select locations.]
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
A picture of the genetically diverse communities who practiced Seima-Turbino techniques became clear with the advent of ancient DNA science.
Some of them had genetic ancestry from Yakutia, some of them were Iranic, some of them were Baltic hunter-gatherers from Europe. They’re all buried together at the same sites.
Professor David Reich.
The newest genetic samples, assembled by Kim with the help of other archaeologists, including third co-lead author Leonid Vyazov at Czechia’s University of Ostrava, revealed strong currents of Yakutia ancestry at a succession of ancient burial sites stretching gradually to the west, with each bearing rich reserves of Seima-Turbino objects.
This is a story about the will, the agency of populations who were not numerically dominant in any way but were able to have continental-scale effects on language and culture.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
Previous studies established that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking populations today share an Eastern Eurasian genetic signature. Ancient DNA researchers ruled out the region’s best-known archaeological cultures from contributing to the Uralic expansion
That just meant we needed more data on obscure cultures, or obscure time periods where it was unclear what was happening
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
Today, he found, Uralic-speaking cultures vary in how much Yakutia ancestry they carry.
Estonians retain about 2 percent, Finns about 10. At the eastern end of the distribution, the Nganasan people — clustered at the northernmost tip of Russia — have close to 100 percent Yakutia ancestry. At the other extreme, modern-day Hungarians have lost nearly all of theirs.
But we know, based on ancient DNA work from the medieval conquerors of Hungary, that the people who brought the language there did carry this ancestry.
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
A separate finding concerns another group of Siberian-spawned languages, once widely spoken across the region. The Yeniseian language family may be contracting today, with the last survivor being central Siberia’s critically endangered Ket, now spoken by just a handful of the culture’s elders. But Yeniseian’s influence was long evident to linguists and archaeologists alike.
Just like ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Missouri’ are from Algonquian, there are Yeniseian toponyms in regions that today speak Mongolic or Turkic languages. When you consider this trace on the landscape, its influence extends far beyond where Yeniseian languages are spoken.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
The study locates the first speakers of the Yeniseian family some 5,400 years ago near the deep waters of Lake Baikal, its southern shores just a few hours by car from the current border with Mongolia.
The genetic findings also provide the first genetic signal — albeit a tentative one — for Western Washington University linguist Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, which proposed genealogical connections between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene family of North American Indigenous languages.
Abstract
The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples, but much of their history is poorly understood. In particular, the genomic formation of populations that speak Uralic and Yeniseian languages today is unknown. Here, by generating genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals spanning this region, we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal. Contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia were off-gradient and descended from a population that was the primary source for Native Americans, which then mixed with populations of Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin to produce two populations whose expansion coincided with the collapse of pre-Bronze Age population structure. Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers. We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards from the Lena River Basin around 4,000 years ago into the Altai-Sayan region and into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy—a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that expanded explosively from the Altai1. The 16 Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists and from a range of hunter-gatherer groups. Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities.
From around 3000 BCE, the Yamnaya began expanding westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia. In Europe, they merged with existing Neolithic farming populations, giving rise to new archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware culture. Genetic studies show that modern Europeans, particularly in the north and centre, carry a significant proportion of Yamnaya ancestry. This migration also likely played a major role in spreading Proto-Indo-European languages, the ancestor of most modern European and many South and Central Asian languages.
The Yamnaya legacy is deeply embedded in Europe’s genetic and cultural fabric, but it also offers a direct challenge to Bible-literalist creationism. Their existence, migrations, and influence are dated to thousands of years before the supposed Biblical Flood or the Tower of Babel. Their story is reconstructed using ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, and comparative linguistics—scientific disciplines that directly contradict young-Earth timelines. Far from originating from a single post-Flood population a few thousand years ago, European ancestry is shown to be the result of complex, prehistoric population movements over tens of thousands of years.
In short, the Yamnaya are a vivid example of how real human history, grounded in empirical evidence, diverges sharply from mythological accounts. Their migrations demonstrate the power of science to uncover the dynamic, interconnected, and ancient nature of human societies—undermining any literal reading of Genesis as a factual account of our origins.
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Reconstituted scenario of Monte Clérigo tracksite, generated by AI tools following the guidance, and final artworks of J.M. Galán (ChatGPT-4 was used to select the prompts, at https://openai.com/index/gpt-4/; Image Generator Pro to generate various versions, at https://imagegeneratorpro.com; DALL-E3 for the nuances and quality of the image, at https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/; Photoshop 26.4.1 (www.adobe.com) and digital pencil of Procreate for iPad version 5.3.14, at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/procreate/id425073498, for drawing over the selected image version).
The discovery of 78,000-year-old Neanderthal footprints on a Portuguese beach is yet another blow to creationist pseudoscience. Preserved in the ancient sands of Monte Clérigo, the tracks of an adult male, a child, and a toddler walking together paint a vivid picture of Neanderthal life — not as brutish subhumans, but as highly social beings living in complex family groups, navigating diverse coastal environments long before modern humans entered Europe. Such findings are not only consistent with the evolutionary timeline but utterly irreconcilable with young-Earth creationist beliefs.
According to mainstream geological dating techniques, these footprints were made tens of thousands of years before the supposed biblical date of creation (around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, depending on interpretation). For creationists who insist that all of Earth’s history must be crammed into a few millennia, these kinds of discoveries are profoundly inconvenient. Worse still, the clarity of the evidence — physical impressions in sediment, dated using well-established methods like optically stimulated luminescence — makes them difficult to hand-wave away.
Faced with such a challenge, creationists will likely fall back on a familiar toolkit of denial strategies. Some will try to cast doubt on the dating methods, resorting to pseudoscientific critiques of OSL or claiming unknown “contamination” skewed the results. Others may assert that the footprints were made after Noah’s Flood — an idea that stretches credulity beyond breaking point given the age and geological context. And, of course, some will simply ignore the evidence altogether, pretending it doesn’t exist or insisting that Neanderthals were just humans who lived in “post-Babel dispersion” times, despite the overwhelming fossil, genetic, and archaeological data to the contrary.
From an early age, the human brain interprets patters and sees faces everywhere. Draw two large black discs on a white sheet of paper and show it to a human baby of just a few weeks old and you will probably make the baby smile, just as they smile when they look at your face. Their brain has perceived the dots as the eyes of a face. This is the phenomenon of human perception known as pareidolia.
Some religious people, in an effort to justify holding irrational beliefs, often attribute these appearances of 'Jesus' or 'Mary', as miracles with some deep religious significance. For example, this anti-Atheist Gotcha, which appeared on Quora a couple of years ago:
Atheists, if there is no God, then why does Jesus' face sometimes appear on toast?
Imagine walking through the woods and briefly believing you're seeing a face in a knot of moss—only to realise seconds later that it’s just a tree. That flicker of recognition is your brain’s face-detection machinery springing into action. In a recent experiment at the University of Surrey, researchers used gaze-cueing techniques to show that when people perceive a face-like arrangement in inanimate objects, their attention is captured even more powerfully than by the averted gaze of a real face. These face-like patterns don’t need eyes, a nose, or even realistic features—just the right suggestion of symmetry and placement is enough for the brain to “see” a face where none exists.
This phenomenon, known as face pareidolia, is a by-product of evolution, not evidence of design. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's safer to wrongly detect a face in a shadow than to miss a predator or an ally. But while this trait once had clear survival value, it now fuels more curious beliefs. Religious individuals, for instance, often interpret pareidolic faces—especially when perceived in burnt toast, water stains, or tree bark—as miraculous signs from divine figures like Jesus or the Virgin Mary. What neuroscience tells us is that these “visions” are false positives produced by a brain primed to find patterns and assign meaning, even when none exists. Evolution has given us a perceptual system that’s fast, but not always accurate—and our cultural context then fills in the rest.
How the human brain interprets so many things as faces is the subject of a recent open access paper in i-Perception by researchers led by Dr Di Fu of the University of Surrey, with colleagues from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A spiral galaxy with a disc made up of several swirling arms. Patchy blue clouds of gas are speckled over the disc, where stars are forming and lighting up the gas around them. The core of the galaxy is large and shines brightly gold, while the spiral arms are a paler and faint reddish colour. Neighbouring galaxies - from small, elongated spots to larger swirling spirals - can be seen across the black background.
Take a grain of rice and hold it between your thumb and forefinger at arm’s length while looking up at the night sky. The patch of sky hidden behind that tiny grain of rice probably contains thousands of galaxies—each with around half a trillion stars. Some of these stars are ancient, nearing the end of their tens-of-millions-of-years lifespans; others are just beginning to form from clouds of gas and debris left behind by older stars that exploded as supernovae.
What lies behind that grain of rice is a tiny fragment of a dynamic, evolving, ever-changing, and expanding universe. A universe of which our ancient prophets were completely unaware as they crafted imaginative descriptions of its origins—descriptions written just a few thousand years ago that portrayed it as a small, unchanging cosmos, with a flat Earth at the centre covered by a dome.
But let’s not be too hard on them. As they stood in their Canaanite pastures, the Earth must indeed have looked flat and small, and the sky would have seemed like the roof of a great tent, adorned with tiny lights and with the sun and moon suspended from it. To them, the Earth appeared fixed and immobile while the dome overhead turned slowly, or perhaps invisible spirits moved the lights across the heavens each night. They didn’t know where the sun went after sunset and imagined the moon might hide in a deep valley during the day.
A major stumbling block that non-biologist Christian fundamentalist theologian William A. Dembski has blundered into is that his so-called ‘proof of intelligent design’ (i.e., the Christian god) also, by the same reasoning, constitutes evidence for malevolent design — something found in virtually every genome of every parasite and pathogen. This presents CDesign proponentsists with a fatal paradox: either their ‘proof of intelligent design’ also proves the existence of an evil designer, or ‘complex specified information’ is not the definitive evidence for design they like to claim it is.
A classic example — and another blow to creationist reasoning—has just been described in a study by researchers from the Swiss universities of Basel and Zurich. They have recovered and analysed the genome of the virus responsible for the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which killed more people than were killed in the First World War. In fact, the term ‘Spanish flu’ is a misnomer; the virus is now believed to have originated in a U.S. military base in Kansas and was brought to Europe by American soldiers.
The Swiss team discovered that from the outset, the virus appears to have been pre-adapted for infectivity and immune evasion. They identified three key mutations that remained unchanged as the virus evolved over the course of the pandemic. Two of these mutations made the virus resistant to an antiviral component of the human immune system, while the third enabled it to bind more effectively to receptors on the surface of human cells, allowing it to enter and infect them more readily. These mutations were so effective that victims frequently died within hours of the onset of symptoms.
This image, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a spiral disc around the young star HD 135344B.
ESO/F. Maio et al.
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This image, captured with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a spiral disc around the young star HD 135344B. The image, which was released in 2016, was obtained with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument.
It takes a special form of self-deluding immunity to facts and reason for creationists to cling to the absurd belief that the Bible’s description of a small universe formed *ex nihilo* in a few days — by nothing more than a few magic words spoken in a language no one was alive to understand — could possibly reflect reality.
Meanwhile, science continues to produce evidence for a very old, immense universe that is constantly changing and evolving, where new stars and planetary systems are being observed as they form. Many of these systems lie so far away that the light from them has taken billions of years to reach us — in stark contrast to the few thousand years allowed by the Biblical narrative.
As I’ve previously explained on this blog, modern astronomy and the wealth of evidence it provides shows that the Biblical account is not merely inaccurate — it is irredeemably wrong. It can’t even be salvaged as metaphor or allegory. It is exactly as wrong as one would expect from people who believed the Earth was a small, flat disc with a dome over it, and that life was created out of soil, fully formed, just a few thousand years ago.
Today, we have yet more evidence that utterly refutes the Bible’s creation myth — and this time, it doesn’t come from events billions of years ago, but from a mere 440 light-years away. That means the light we’re seeing now set off on its journey in 1585 — the same year Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to found the ill-fated Roanoke Colony in North America, and the Anglo-Spanish War broke out.
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), have observed a giant planet forming within the accretion disk of a young star — exactly as the modern theory of planetary formation predicts. In other words, the universe is still forming and evolving, in complete contradiction to the static, one-time-only creation described in Genesis.
